inanimates

Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. Plural form of inanimate.

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

Examples

Furthermore, the researchers noted that while children generally are taught in school that only plants and animals are alive, the traditional Menominee notion of "alive" includes natural inanimates, such as rocks and water, and may even include artifacts, depending on the purpose for which they were made.

Witness page 56 of Archaic Syntax in Indo-European - The spread of transitivity 2000 where the theory is artfully destroyed in a pair of brief sentences:Yet cross-linguistic analysis has pointed out that ergative marking affects first of all inanimates, and only later animates.

I've traced this odd quirk to the genitive endings *-ós and *-óm, the latter of which probably had originally been used for a seperate case altogether (perhaps once meaning “amongst” or “amidst”) which later acquired a collective nuance (hence its use in inanimates) and then finally a plural sense (hence the ending being used in animate genitive plurals).

The catch was controlled by a brass knob, round and slippery, and it was quite impossible for the stick, by far the most dexterous of the inanimates, to manipulate it: he had tried on several occasions while his comrades were otherwise occupied.